Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".
Often times you will find cash only businesses, especially in Chinatown and restaurants that will give you a discount on the final bill if you pay in cash. I have been to some mid-range restaurants that will knock 10% off my bill if I pay in cash instead of credit. This is the merchant fighting back using their own stratagems.
In many cases in my experience the vendors who can successfully pull off this strategy have a high quality, high value product and operate in a no-frills store front and are often family owned, maybe a generation or two already. There is a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich vendor where I live who has been around for 30 years only accepts cash - they have the history and patronage to pull this off.
And then there are plenty of other merchants that are 100% cashless, presumably because they don’t want the hassle (and perhaps cost) of handing, exchanging, storing, and transporting paper cash and coins to and from a bank.
> I have been to some mid-range restaurants that will knock 10% off my bill if I pay in cash instead of credit. This is the merchant fighting back using their own stratagems.
Not sure how things are in the USA, but in Germany, that has nothing to do with "fighting back" and everything with dodging VAT.
Cynically that's probably often the case but if you're offering <$10 food items at a mom & pop shop the credit card fees are non-trivial so there probably is a very legitimate incentive to take cash. There's also benefits to getting immediate cash that you can put in the bank for expenses at the end of the day vs waiting a day or two for credit card money.
> if you're offering <$10 food items at a mom & pop shop the credit card fees are non-trivial so there probably is a very legitimate incentive to take cash.
Yeah, but not a 10% incentive, especially given that depositing cash isn't free either, for commercial accounts.
> There's also benefits to getting immediate cash that you can put in the bank for expenses at the end of the day vs waiting a day or two for credit card money.
> There's also benefits to getting immediate cash that you can put in the bank for expenses at the end of the day vs waiting a day or two for credit card money.
patio11 actually argues that it's the opposite which explains why stores offer you to take out cash along with your purchase when you pay by debit card) in another article at https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-infrastructure-be... - "And so, getting magical paper out of the till and into your wallet without it first visiting the bank saves the retailer money. It can also, potentially, earn the retailer a small amount of float. Cash in its tills is dead money and may not be deposited until e.g. the end of the week or later, but selling that paper to a customer for real money results in it arriving in their bank account faster than physically walking it to the bank."
It might be different for a small mom&pop store that actually deposits their cash every day, of course.
The sort of obvious thing is that taking cash doesn't just save the merchant credit card fees but enables them to play games with the income they report for tax. Same with like repairmen that will give you a much better deal if you pay cash - it's not just CC fees they are avoiding.
Fun fact, this is actually illegal here in Sweden! That is, merchants aren't allowed to adjust prices based on payment method. Not sure what the reasoning is.
Because the main purpose of cash payments in small businesses is tax evasion - not just VAT but also paying family members in cash and thus dodging even more.
Fun fact, credit card merchants successfully made it illegal in the USA too, but that legislation expired and now it is legal to charge more for credit card usage (though credit card companies prefer that you offer a "cash discount" than an equivalent "credit card fee").
In Costa Rica this is illegal too but going through the hassle of reporting it to the local authorities is a pain and you won't gain much, just annoy the dealership.
Usually the POS rate is around 2% so at the end of the day you'll split it evenly and get a 3% discount. A few years back it was even highter and I bought several home appliances and saved around $100 so it's worth for both parties.
Now imagine people that deal with ranges from 10K to 100K - It's definitely worth it shaving a few bucks here and there
My local restaurant instituted a surcharge for card users. Kind of irritating but I understand why, considering the margins in the restaurant industry.
It used to be a violation of their merchant agreement but it seems a 2013 court case made it that as long as it's disclosed in a certain way, it seems to be ok. About 4 states still outlaw it, based on some digging, but none of the card rules that I could dig up allowed applying that fee to debit cards containing the logo (e.g. https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/business/overview/support/me... )
I have a colleague at Amazon who mentioned this last point as the explicit reason he planning to leave Amazon. He was (is) a people manager and every year, having to cut off a member of his team for no reason was not something he wanted to do on an ethical level. He described the process with me and in the end his solution was to give the IC a tip off that a PIP was coming and in that case that person was able to move to another team quickly enough to avoid the chopping block.
It's all about the money, the writer himself mentioned he had 100k's of stock that would vest. When you get into the 100k range of windfalls, people will do all sorts of things, even people you have known for years. That's why sometimes you only see people's true nature when their parents die and estate settlement comes into the picture.
If you don't want to deal with this kind of stuff, don't allow the almighty dollar to control your life.
I can recommend reading about the "Chaebol", which is effectively this in South Korea. Five corporations got so huge that they control politics, and the C-staff of those companies is basically immune to no matter what the legal system throws at them because they always just threaten to fire so many of their workers that the politicians give in to them.
There's a name I haven't heard in a while. I'm so glad for the revival of that IP/content. From what I can tell, all the early-80s cyberpunk literature basically had the same theme, so the classic authors are all good reads as well. It must have been something about late 70s / early 80s USA that made everyone feel like we were on the verge of corporate takeover of government. Understandably, I suppose.
> It must have been something about late 70s / early 80s USA that made everyone feel like we were on the verge of corporate takeover of government.
Yes and no. At the time, Cyberpunk was a fringe movement by some rebel authors. Hence the "punk". Until then, mainstream science fiction was very much obsessed with nice utopias that used technology and communication for the benefit of society in far distant futures. Cyberpunk tore it all down and pointed at the possible nightmare of a not so distant future where all pervading technology leaves you cluelessly behind, crushed under the foot of megacorporate feudalism.
> It must have been something about late 70s / early 80s USA that made everyone feel like we were on the verge of corporate takeover of government. Understandably, I suppose.
Rise of mass media and opaque conglomerates along with the poor economics of late 70's through 80's that saw many (mostly) manufacturing jobs get nuked by boardrooms.
I listened to a college professor talking about Neuromancer and he connected republican president Ronald Reagon's "Reaganomics" to the theme corporations were taking over the world.
Chaebol (Korea) and Zaibatsu (Japan). The former are still very much alive and kicking, while the former was more or less snuffed out in the post-war period (as is my understanding).
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I think there is an additional issue here - which is if you want to pay to remove ads from youtube you have to have an account and that by definition provides your analytics and browsing history to youtube no? There is no way to remove ads without turning over your behavioral analytics to youtube.
Hi, I am a generalist, with a strong specialization in Data science and machine learning. I have an academic background in physics and over 10 years of programming experience in C++ and Python.
Location:Toronto, Canada
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Email:kw@ownmail.net
The laws are there due to anti-money laundering. Since virtually no cash income (in those country) is viable - think salaries, etc., it's not hard to be followed. All retail sales need a valid VAT receipt, all of those receipts have source of the payment as well. Wholesale tends to be never in cash (requires tax administration approval), the laws might differ, of course - however that's a common framework.
